Sorry Harry Potter Fans, Quidditch Is The Dumbest Sport Ever

I was sitting on the main quad at college last fall when I saw
people playing quidditch.

Organized quidditch. Real, human quidditch. With rings and
dodgeballs and a guy in a yellow shirt pretending to be the
snitch.

This is how strong of the pull of the Harry Potter universe has
become for 20-somethings.

There’s nothing necessarily wrong with it, every generation has
its irrational obsessions. And quidditch is ours.

But here’s my problem with the Potterphiles and their mugglized
game: Quidditch is perhaps the most flawed, poorly constructed
sport ever created.

There are bludger-sized holes in the framework of the game that
make it uninteresting, static, and altogether awful.

Here’s a little primer on the sport for the unacquainted:

It’s 7-on-7, brooms required

You get 10 points for throwing a quaffle (a ball) through an
upright ring

You get 150 points for catching the snitch (a gold thingy
that flies around)

The game can only end if one of the two designated seeker
catches the snitch

There’s a whole bunch of other nerddom, but that’s the basic
skeleton of the game.

You don’t have to be pure-blood to figure out the problem with
this sport: the snitch is too damn important.

Catching the snitch in quidditch is more meaningful than any
single activity in any other sport. More than starting pitching
in baseball, quarterback play in football, team defense in
basketball, and whatever it is that helps you win at hockey.

Catching the snitch is quidditch.

The notion that a team could amass a 150-point lead before the
snitch is caught is out of the realm of possibility.

Harry typically hunts the thing down in 10 movie-minutes tops,
and there’s no evidence that the anonymous ring-based players
have the offensive explosiveness to even approach 150 points.

The quaffle/rings/other stuff truly serves no purpose. It’s like
if basketball hid a hacky sack in the arena and said whichever
team finds it first gets 75 points and the game ends. The “game”
of basketball as we know it would suddenly become pointless.

Quidditch is not a team sport, it’s an individual sport
masquerading as a team sport. The only player that matters is the
seeker (Harry Potter, surprise, surprise), and the other six
players are locked in a Sisyphusian back-and-forth that has zero
effect on the outcome of the game.

At the end of the day, seekers like Harry get the adoration of
their fellow pubescent witches and wizards while the other
players don’t get squat. Because these players never mattered,
and they probably would have never signed up for the team in the
first place if they knew they’d be flying around like an idiots
for no reason.

The best sports contain an endless series of possibilities.
Quidditch only contains two: Team A gets the snitch and wins, or
Team B gets the snitch and wins.

It’s absurdly dull. If two eight-year-old wizards made that game
up in their backyard, they’d get bored of it after about 15
minutes.

Apparently this is lost on the students of Hogwarts — who are too
wrapped up in school’s experiential learning techniques to notice
that the game they love rests on the brooms of just two players.

And it’s lost on Potterphiles — who are too connected to their
13-year-old selves to call a dumb game a dumb game.